The case made against used hard drives is similar to all other kinds of pre-owned hardware, but it rings truer because of the moving parts inside. You’re putting your data on something that has already spent years spinning in a chassis you’ve never seen, so some hesitation is definitely natural, but I think we have the risk backwards. A used enterprise drive tells you what it is and where it’s been, while a new consumer drive tells you nothing until it fails. Add what’s happened to storage prices across the board, and secondhand enterprise drives are the last real deal in storage and the ones I’d rather own.

I think one of the coolest things people can do with old tech is repurpose it. Recently, we've seen a wave of people tinker with their Kindles to give them new leases on life (such as that one time someone turned their Paperwhite into an e-ink digital assistant). Now, someone else has demonstrated that the Microsoft Zune HD that has been sitting in your bits box for years can now become your very own portable Super Mario 64 console.

For every AI feature of questionable utility that Microsoft advertises relentlessly, there's a useful one hiding in the OS in plain sight. Many of these tools aid productivity or everyday troubleshooting, and some let you forgo paying for utilities that do the same job outright.

A large TV is the best way to enjoy your favorite shows and movies. This Hisense 65-inch M7 series Google TV combines an impressive image with excellent, versatile software. It's also quite affordable, costing just $374 at Walmart thanks to a small discount.

We're getting to an interesting point in AI development where they can code up an app pretty quickly. Whether or not the app is any good is another story, but we're definitely turning around some kind of corner with AI development. Well, one person has bravely decided to take on Adobe at their own game with an entire suite of software coded up with the help of AI, and it's an interesting insight into what the future may hold.

An Anthropic AI model provided false information about an unsolved homicide to a Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) tipline, according to a report from 6abc. In a statement released on Friday, the PPD said the AI model sent the tip through PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com on July 18th, but the investigators never reviewed it because it was marked as spam.Anthropic learned its AI model sent the false tip on September 28th and notified the PPD on October 7th. The company said that during testing, its AI model was interacting with "randomly selected websites" and submitted false information through the PPD's tipline, according to the PPD's stateme …Read the full story at The Verge.

If your older (or brand new) smart TV starts to feel slow, you might think it is time to buy a new one. However, you can do a few simple things in the settings menu to perk it up. It had been a few years since I'd really dug into my main TV's settings menu, and I got it feeling new again. Plus, I didn't have to exhaustively search for the right code to access the factory service menu to make tweaks.

Two of the biggest model launches this year happened just days apart, and since then the entire internet has run test after test on them. Naturally, my feed was inundated by all the utilities and designs that people were vibe-coding with Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra, especially when it came to comparing them. I must say, it's been difficult picking my favorites because taste is mainly subjective. So I wanted to put them to the test myself and see how they actually follow instructions and improvise on the spot.

Integrated graphics are usually an afterthought, especially on a mini PC that's decked out for home lab use. The Minisforum box I have and its Intel Core Ultra 9 389H aren't particularly adept at gaming, but when trying a handful of titles on it, new and old, it surprised me. It has a cut-down version of the integrated graphics in the full-fat chip, featuring only a third of the Xe3 cores. It also only has one stick of DDR5 SODIMM memory, which is about as bad of configuration as you can give an integrated GPU. Despite that, it ran most of what I threw at it.

Mini PCs are versatile, compact computers you can buy on a budget. They can replace traditional desktops and also become a valuable part of a home lab or smart home. The only downside is that you have to buy everything else, like a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

Getting a new Android phone usually means spending the first hour removing apps I don't want and setting up the ones I actually use. Over time, I stopped treating this as something I had to figure out every time. I now have a small list of replacements that I install almost automatically whenever I switch phones. They cover some of the apps I use most often, and I don't have to pay for any of them. More importantly, I didn't pick these replacements just to be different. Each one solves a specific problem I had with the default experience and fits better into the way I use Android.

CPU makers have noticed that the seemingly unending RAM price hikes are making it tough for a lot of us to upgrade our PCs. Their solution? A return to last-gen DDR4 RAM. Intel and AMD are making new CPUs that'll support the older, more affordable type of memory. On Friday, Gigabyte announced that two of its motherboard lines will support "upcoming" processors built on Intel's LGA 1700 socket. That socket debuted in 2021 with the 12th gen Alder Lake CPUs and supported both DDR4 RAM and the then-new DDR5 RAM. Intel dropped it for a DDR5-only approach in 2024. But according to Gigabyte, the dual format support is now being revived, with new …Read the full story at The Verge.